While resale value is one method of determining value, one that has rightfully been dismantled in the other letters, there are more explicit ways of showing the Macs relative value. I start with the major argument that PC-box proponents generally make and conclude with my own favorite.

(1) The component/system value is better with the PC to begin with. This is true, on some level. The Macs, generally though, have very high quality components throughout the computer, with much lower rates of individual component failure. While there are exceptions, they tend to prove the rule more than anything else (recent battery issues, a few monitor glitches over the years, and the most recent power adapter issues with MacBookPros are examples that come to mind). But, PC's are often cheaper because the components they are made with are cheaper, and fail accordingly. Unless you are someone who knows how, and likes to rebuild computers (and you don't have a laptop) this is a very big factor in lower cost of ownership. It is the same argument I have with my brother over cars. I drive a Honda, cost me more to start with, never goes to the shop. My brother, loves to work on cars, drives a Chevy Tahoe, which breaks down almost monthly. He will brag about how he can go down to the auto parts store and get a brake assembly for $50 bucks and fix it himself. That's great for him, I don't have the tools, desire or weekend to spare to fix my car. Most people don't have the skills, or desire to fix their computers either.

(2) Simple aesthetic pleasure. When I open up my laptop next to ANY laptop built by someone other than Apple, I know I bought the right one. It looks better, it looks cleaner, and most importantly, I am working faster than they are. I mean that in the simplest sense. I open my laptop, and the other person opens theirs, and I am working sooner. I get more done, and spend less time worrying about the tool I use than they do. That's real value, not easily monetized, but real honest value. Not to mention, silver is just sexier than black.

You normally write a great column. This one, however, has a bunch of problems.

Macs are boutiqueware at this point. They simply don't hit the price points that low-end PCs hit, because they're not low-end hardware. For many people, this is an extravagance that is simply unnecessary. Apple doesn't offer any real low-end options, despite what people say about the Mac mini.

Resale value is also misleading. If you have $300 to spend on a computer, it doesn't really matter that Apple's $1000 computers will retain much more of their purchase value. Implying that this somehow helps people who don't have the means to afford a Mac in the first place is kind of like chiding the poor for renting and not owning their homes, because, duh, it's cheaper!

Also there's a whole thing about ease of upgrades, which could be factored into the cost however you want to. Mac minis age poorly in my experience specifically because of these limitations. Upgrades are expensive and options are limited.

Apple makes great computers. My lab is filled with them, and I love using them. That said, my home desktop and laptop are both PCs, and will remain so for quite some time. I don't have the money for a Mac -- I know exactly how much they cost.

I live in a mixed marriage household -- I'm a Mac user with an Intel Macbook (that boots XP on the side sometimes) and a PPC powerbook, my partner uses everything (currently he's got a dual boot intel laptop that has XP and Ubantu, plus a PPC powerbook and a PPC ibook running some *X distro other than yellowdog.) I use that term very specifically because the OS wars remind me a lot of the various religious wars over the past several millennia.

I worked for a Sun distributor for two years, in a shop that required me to run Solaris as my desktop, and at the time I was violently opposed to Microsoft and hadn't come over to Mac yet, so I ran KDE at home.

And I spent more time dinking around with my computers at home and work than I spent working. And so did every coworker. I spent more time in the command line universe fixing things than I spent in the GUI doing the things I wanted to do. And that was not okay. Not at all.

My partner still spends a lot of time dinking... fortunately, he loves doing that. I don't. I really don't. I hate having to reconfigure half the machine's protocols because I used the machine at the university library with ethernet hookups, then came home to the household wifi... and now I can't check my mail. The last thing I want to do in the morning before I put my English muffin in the toaster is reprogram it because yesterday, I had toast. And yet, a lot of the time, that's exactly what *X requires of the user.

For most users, a computer needs to be like a toaster - it needs to be able to handle a wide variety of inputs (as long as they're all pretty much similar - i.e. based in 1 and 0) with seamless or near seamless switching.

XP switches adequately, but with a lot of risk behind the scenes; Apple does it well, with far less risk. *X does it well, but it's like watching avant garde theater -- everything's out in the open, all the stage hands are smoking and chatting at the edge of the stage while the actors are trying to perform. And someone's throwing flaming sugarcubes at Barbies and reciting Brecht in German.

For most users - not superusers, which is what I am, and not admins or developers or R&D developers, which is what my partner is - *X requires too steep a learning curve and far too much of the guts hanging out.

*X (and all the flavors of UNIX) have their places, and I do believe that basic computing classes need to be held in the *X environment -- tinkertoy programming isn't appropriate until after you know how the tinkertoys work. But until that happens, and until this and the next generation of GUI-addicted users toddle off to that great LAN party in the sky, we're stuck with a heavy market need for safe, simple, easy to use GUI based OSes. And even after everyone knows the basics, for speed and efficiency, we need the GUIs.

The one thing that the megacorp OSes offer that *X doesn't is user service, documentation and consistency. Sun had it for a while, but Sun hasn't been healthy in years. The various flavors of Linux are all put together by talented and enthusiastic amateurs (and I use that in the sense of one who does so for the love of doing something)... which means it's a spare time project. A kid or a new job comes along and projects get sidelined. Documentation rusts and dies on the vine. Help files and manpages go unupdated. And there's no one to call or email when it gets bad... That consistency, service and documentation improve the user experience a lot in very behind the scenes ways.

There will always be *X users, just as there will always be people who do historical reenactment. Both are labors of love. Both are not for everyone.